How Authenticity Built a Global Brand | Sean Whalen x Ryan Alford Podcast

What does true success really look like and are you brave enough to pursue it? Put on your big boy pants and get after it. In this episode we sat down with Sean Whalen, founder of Lion's Not Sheep. Listen in as he shares his raw, unfiltered journey into building a multi-million dollar brand by speaking his truth and encouraging others to do the same. A lot of great insights from this conversation that starts right about now. This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and caching checks? Well, it starts right about now. I know we could go a lot of rabbit trails, a lot of things. I don't want to cap us too much. But as we build towards where you've taken Lion's Not Sheep and all the e-commerce growth there. Maybe let's just back up, let's give our audience the recap of Sean. I'll keep it super simple. I was really successful at a young age. I grew up in a superparent home, built a couple of companies. I made a lot of money in my 20s. I talked about in my book how I felt like I was juggling bowling balls. I said you could juggle on all the bowling balls. I don't know what a midlife crisis is, but I left my marriage. I left my business. I stuck my head up and asked for over a year trying to figure out not how to make money, how to build business, but why was I even here? What's the purpose of all this? I went on an interesting journey. I got really depressed, suicidal, and found myself in a really, really, really dark place. I ended up hiring a coach, trying to figure out how do I get out of this mindset? How do I shift things around? And one of the things that he had challenged me to do was to start sharing my thoughts and what was going on on social media. To make a really long story short, I ended up sharing one night, some real dark shit, and really just told the truth. For lack of better words, I just fucking told the truth for once. And that post ended up going viral. Millions and millions and millions of people thought I went from having like 200 friends on Facebook to almost 40,000 followers in a matter of 10 days. And in that process, I left the company. I left everything, and one day the phrase line is not she came into my mind. I was looking at this catalog, and there was another company with something kind of similar, and it just popped into my head. And it just resonated, and it wouldn't go away. And I kept thinking to myself, like, looking at everything in life, like, I have a choice, right? To follow and do what everybody else is doing, and to buy this, because he bought this, or build this, because he built this. Or this is what this needs to be, and it was like, no, do you fuck that? Like, what do I want to do? Like, who do I want to be? Like, what life do I want to build? And when that line is not she came to me, I called my buddy who went to clothing company one day, and I said, hey, man, can you, can you make me a t-shirt? He said, sure. And I was wearing it one day, and I had a picture, and I posted it on Facebook, and all these comments started coming in. Dude, that's bad ass. Where'd you get that? Can I get that shirt? And I called my buddy. I was like, I don't know how to sell t-shirts. Like, how the fuck do I go? He's like, I'll set you up shop, buy store, and whatever. And so that kind of started the whole, for me, it was just my mantra. It just became my way of thinking, my way of being. It was very personal to me. And I saw a lot of people gravitate towards it. A lot of people connect with it. And it became, and what is now a huge movement where millions of people engage with the content, and know about it, and just recently, we've had some people that have gotten me in Smith, who's in New Jersey, who the governor was trying to shut his gym down. I woke up one morning, this is probably a month ago, a month and a half ago, and I had been tagged over 100 times in this post. I'm like, what the fuck? And I open up Instagram, and there's this guy who's super defined, like, street governor, whatever, whatever. And he's got a lot of stuff she's had on him. He ended up just seeing one of our ads, and bought the hat, and his post won viral. And it was really interesting over the course of the next couple of days. He was on CNN Fox, Tucker Carlson, all these big, big shows, and he was wearing the lines not sheet gear, and our free man t-shirt. And it was just really cool to see that he hadn't, he wasn't really, he didn't know me per se, but he vibed with the brand. He recognized it, resonated with it, and decided to buy a shirt and a hat, and it just kind of brought me full circle. It's pretty freaking amazing. How enlightening was it? I can only imagine, like you said, you felt like you lived, not necessarily a lie, but you never felt comfortable being transparent. Maybe vulnerable, if that's, if I can use that word. Sure, how enlightening was that moment when Holy shit, I'm being myself, and I'm getting garnering the attention, not that maybe you were seeking before when you were copying everyone else, but just the irony in that had to be just fucking amazing. It was, and what's interesting is we're all programmed to lie. I don't care who's watching this, black, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, all of us were programmed the exact same way. And when you really stop and think about it, like we've been indoctrinated since we were children, to do as we're told, to speak words that will be pleasing to everyone, don't wrestle anybody's feathers, and that's literally what we do. We're told, tell the truth, tell the truth, tell the truth, but the ramifications for telling the truth are dark, they're bad, so that we just lie. And as you get older, you become a man, it's like, we don't talk about emotions, we don't talk about where we're really at. You just man the fuck up, you know, put on your big boy pants and get after it. And the truth of the matter is that, you know, more men killed themselves in 2018 than during the Great Depression. Why? It's not because there's a lack of money or a lack of opportunity or lack of chicks or, you know, ass running around. It's because dudes are like trapped in this box, like I was 10 years ago. I'm like, dude, I'm not happy with where I'm at, but I don't know how to talk about it. And my boys were like, hey man, how you doing? I'm like, I'm good. Well, then I was like, oh shit, Bob killed himself. We didn't even know Bob was sad. Bob looks like he's got the idea of life. Well, no one thinks that they're lying. The reality is, if you're not speaking the truth, then what is it? And if you're not sharing what's really inside of you, how you really feel, what's really going on, it's not an issue of political correctness or I don't want to piss anybody off. It's like, what are you doing? Are you speaking your truth? Yes or no? I noticed two things that happen. Number one, people resonated with my message. Millions of people resonated with it. And the second thing that I saw after I shared this was that I felt better. It was almost like, okay, I got better. You know what I mean? And so when I talked to entrepreneurs and business owners and people, like, dude, you're a better father when you feel better. You're a better mother when you feel better. You're a better everything when you feel better. Lying doesn't feel good. Lying is scary. Do they know? Do they know? Do they know? Where you just fucking tell the truth and you got nothing to worry about. Something has shaped Sean Whalen. It's some point in life. Well, well before you got lost or you got found or anything like that, I feel like there has to be these opinions and these beliefs that kind of formed all of this, something shaped that. I was actually a really quiet kid. I was really reserved. I was a chubby little kid. And I think for me when looking back at it, when I went on a Mormon mission, I went on a two-year Mormon mission, that was where I really started to kind of find my voice. I mean, you're out basically selling God. We were going door to door, pitching God to people. And it was something I was really passionate about. It was something that like I didn't grow up in the Mormon church, I grew up Catholic. And so it was kind of a recent convert to the church. And I just started realizing that people loved to connect. People loved to talk. And I was really good at it. I was good at just talking to people. And I know that sounds really weird, but like there really is an art form to communication. There's an art form being able to not just tell us, so, hey, how's your water? Like, why do you like that water? Okay, great. You know, what are like really fucking listening to people and hearing them and knowing what's driving them. And something that I've always been fascinated about and with is what's behind it. Everybody knows they're being sold something. So we've already got that out of the way. What are you trying to tell me? What are you trying to communicate with me? If the answer is simple, no, then just fucking say no, right? But I love being able to look at complex things and I break it down in my brain to just like coloring book kind of conversations. Like, yeah, this is what this really is. And it's just more, to me, it's more fun that way. You know, we're an at digital agency here and we work a lot of brands and they come to us and they have great products, but they have no story. And I will take a company that has a purpose and a story all day because that's, it's organic. You know, again, it just becomes about blocking and tackling. It's real hard to figure out the Hill Mary, you know, the message. What have been some of those mechanics of, you know, because I've heard you talk about, you know, you started the company, you're selling t-shirts, you had a message, you had a plan. But something poured gas on the fire for the tactics and the, and some of the ways with which you sing growth. He's talking about some of that. I found for me that I embodied lines, not sheep it literally was for me. You know what I mean? Like when I wrote my book, which is sold over a half a million copies completely organically, I mean, I wrote a book that I wanted to read. And so for me, lines, not sheep it, everybody's been telling me, dude, you're in the perfect storm now with the whole political climate. It's strong because it's like, we're all, you're one or the other, right? I do the liner, you're cheap, which is great. You know, but everybody now wants to jump on that, right? And they want to plug into that emotion. They want to plug into the political climate and whatever. And you really don't have a track record. You don't have a tribe. You don't have any of that. I didn't set out to do that. And I think that's what really makes lines not sheep unique. And I think a lot of people need to wrap their head around this. And it's really difficult to do is having the consistency of delivering content and messaging for the long game. Because now we're in the perfect fucking storm. Now we're crushing because so much content has been put out there over the last couple of years. And it wasn't with the objective of selling t-shirts or selling hats or selling any of that shit. I believe that the very best salespeople on planet earth are never selling anything. Like you go to my, you go to my Instagram or my Facebook, you will never see me selling anything. Yet I'm literally able to make millions of dollars through coaching and consulting and other companies that I have. Where are we going? You know, I know you're, you're, you're knee deep and a lot of things. I know this is open doors. And you know, you're coaching how to make shit happen is the book. Everyone listening, go check it out on Amazon. Yeah, Amazon. But what's where we headed? Where are you going? Well, right now we're trying to put the wheels back on the bus. We got our asses kicked in production. We grew so fast. I turned everything on back in March. What I mean by that is I hired a team to come in and we started running ads. I'd never run an ad before. I'd never put ads out there and we went from that to, you know, we were doing two to three thousand dollars a month of just apparel sales. And we did 463 thousand dollars last month of apparel sales and basically 90 days. And it fucked some things up and I learned some very valuable expensive lessons on production and being able to keep up. You know, I really do. I'm passionate about this man. I'm passionate about the ability of, especially with men to really fucking step into who they are and not in some hippy, hippy way. But like, I'm 41 years old and there's a lot of 41 year olds that are like, okay, I got the house in the car and the kids and the thing like, why do I fucking hate my life? Am I not doing anything I want to do? I mean, my wife and I were eating at the same place. You fucking vacation at Disneyland once a year. Like, what am I doing with my life? And mine's not sheep and me specifically is, you know, I'm coaching a lot. I've got multiple facets to the business, but I really want to show people that it's possible. You know what I mean? Like building a really bad ass life is possible. It's not whimsical. It's not because I got a silver spoon. In fact, it's anything but with me. I've worked my ass off for this and I want to be able to show people and show kids and teenagers like, we have one shot of this reality. We have one shot of this life. Like, go build the shit you want to build. That's my end game. I want to leverage what I've gotten out through social media and the following and connections or whatever. But I want somebody to be able to see this hat, see this message, see this t-shirt, resonate with it and have the same feeling of empowerment and power that I do. I don't want to ask you what you want to eat. You've said it. I've interpreted where you see your legacy, but I do want to kind of ask it because like, what do you, you know, when they go to Sean Whale and in 50 years, you know, what, what do you want people to think? The legacy is my kids. It's not wealth. It's not assets that can be distributed. It's not, you know, you know, 401ks and IRAs and kids are splitting, you know, my kids are splitting up. If I played this game right, I've empowered my children to become their own entrepreneurial independent creatures. My legacy, if you will, is that is if I can help these three kids break the chains that I came from and having dysfunction and having, you know, divorce at a young age and having a dad that was never around. You know, if I can be that man to where I'm laying on my death bed knowing, I don't give a fuck about the money. But my kids know that they literally live the fullest life with me. That's my game. But I want to be able to sit back and not have any fucking regrets, know that I played the game. I was all in. I was all in every single day, like with my, with my lover, with my kids, with my business, with my message, like, you can go back and watch thousands of videos. You know that whether you like me or not, whether you agree politically with me or not, you know that I'm spitting my truth and you know that it's coming from my soul. I feel like I'm on a pretty good track with that because that's how I feel literally sitting here. I think you're living it and it's someone that doesn't agree with every single principle of yours. I respect that hell out of you and wanted you on the podcast because I see that is as clear as day. Yeah, well, we're smart. You know, you and I, everybody we think we all think we're smart, right? We should, we shouldn't think you're, you're dumb, but like if you're smart, I love to study and I love to read. And if you think about all of these great men that have come before us, the Carnegie's, the Rockefeller's, the Steve Jobs, the Steve Covey's, these literal like industry creators. And they just to change the face of the earth, they all say the same thing at the end of their book, all of them without question. They all literally say at the end of their books, their biographies, like if I could go back and do it all over again, I would have spent more time doing the things that I wanted to do. I would have spent more time with my family. And I consider myself a pretty smart fella. So if, you know, Carnegie, Rockefeller, Steve Jobs is saying, if I could go back and trade places with Sean at 41 and I'd spend more time playing and doing the things that I want to do. Then I get what Instagram is trying to tell me I get that I'm supposed to be bowling and lambs and jets and the whole thing, but at the end of the day. I'm enjoying my life. I'm living the life and I'm taking the counsel from those guys. You know, and it seems to be working. It works really really well for me. And I've literally never been this happy for a man who made a great business, had a phenomenal family. I literally wake up every day. I'm like, I'm fucking doing it. I really appreciate your time, Sean, been really enlightening and love what you're doing. So if you're looking, follow Sean Whalen on all social media channels, feed us Google, Sean Whalen, W-H-A-L-E-N. If you'll find me on www.SeanWhalen.com, lions.cheap.com, go find them in and find your truth as well. Sean, really appreciate it. Hey, guys, you're going to find us. Ryan is right.com. You'll find highlight clips. You'll find all of my social links at Ryan Allford. Got that blue check before you can buy it. Maybe we'll see you next time. I'll write about now. This has been right about now with Ryan Allford, a Radcast Network production. 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